Congress Demands Answers from CrowdStrike CEO Following Massive Global Outage

In Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has called on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify about a recent massive global outage, the Washington Post reported on Monday. This request comes in the wake of a catastrophic event that disrupted essential services worldwide.

According to Reuters, the outage stemmed from a glitchy update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software, which crashed computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The resulting disruption impacted a wide array of industries, including airlines, banking and healthcare. Microsoft reported on Saturday that approximately 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the defective update.

The consequences of the outage were severe, affecting federal government agencies, airlines, banks, hospitals and other critical sectors globally. The defective update, pushed early Friday morning, led to significant operational disruptions. In response, CrowdStrike announced today that it is testing a new technique aimed at accelerating system remediation for the impacted devices.

“We’re in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique. Customers are encouraged to follow the Tech Alerts for latest updates as they happen and they will be notified when action is needed,” CrowdStrike stated.

Lawmakers Demand Accountability

Members of Congress are seeking thorough explanations from the CrowdStrike CEO and others for what is being described as one of the largest IT outages in history. Representative Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., has been vocal about the need for a detailed investigation. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Rep. Torres urged the Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to investigate the circumstances leading to the outage.

“Both the U.S. Congress and the public are entitled to a full accounting of what went wrong with CrowdStrike’s software and what can be done to prevent such a disruptive event from repeating itself in the future. The impacts — ranging from the grounding of flights to the shutdown of emergency response systems — are too serious to ignore, and we ignore them at our own peril,” Rep. Torres said.

The House Committee on Homeland Security echoed these concerns, emphasizing the need to understand the outage’s implications for border security and other critical infrastructure.

Additionally, Senator Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., has also taken action, sending a letter to the Department of Defense’s Acting Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers. In his letter, Sen. Schmitt requested a briefing on the impact of the outage within the Pentagon.

“A single point of failure in a cybersecurity strategy has proven time and time again to be a threat to our national security. We cannot continue to accept and allow software problems to cripple our civilian and government infrastructure — answers in this case are necessary, and a reexamination across the board of cyber-safeguards is needed moving forward,” Sen. Schmitt stated.

As the investigation unfolds, the focus will be on determining the root cause of the software failure and implementing measures to prevent such incidents in the future.

Source: Reuters